1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the data processing field, and more specifically to a management method and a corresponding system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Management of different types of resources (such as software components, applications or devices) is a critical issue in a data processing system with a distributed architecture. This problem is particular acute when the system includes a high number of logical and/or physical entities (subjects), each one directly controlling one or more resources; the problem is further exacerbated if the subjects have a high level of complexity or are dispersed across a large number of installations.
The management environments known in that art are based on an enforcement model (also known as master/slave model). In this model, the process is entirely controlled by an authority residing at a central site of the system. The authority defines a desired configuration of every subject. For this purpose, the authority accesses a central repository storing the (alleged) current configuration of each subject, and determines the management actions required to bring the subject to the desired configuration starting from the current configuration. The management actions are then enforced remotely by the authority on the subject (which is totally passive).
A drawback of the management environments known in the art is the lack of any kind of cooperation between the authority and the subjects. This lack of cooperation may bring about inconsistencies when the subjects are upgraded out of the control of the authority. Moreover, the solutions currently employed do not support the management of subjects that are temporarily unavailable or off-line. The known management environments require the authority to maintain information about the location of all the subjects; at the same time, the authority must handle the communication with every subject directly.
An additional problem arises when two or more different subjects are correlated to each other (for example, in a monitoring application an agent under control and a server collecting monitoring information). In the management environments known in the art, the correlation must be defined statically when a corresponding solution is deployed in the system. Therefore, the authority is able to establish the desired correlation only addressing the involved subjects directly at a physical level; for example, the authority must configure the monitoring agent so as to point to an address of the corresponding monitoring server.
This lack of flexibility is unacceptable in high dynamic environments in which the configuration of the subjects changes frequently. Moreover, the above-mentioned drawbacks greatly increase the complexity of any solution to be deployed in the system.